How do I win a chess tournament?

Description

Chess tournaments are competitions that involve dozens to thousands of players. Every participant plays a fixed number of games (typically 7 to 9), and the outcome of the game determines the next opponent, where winning a game makes you play against a stronger opponent while loosing a game lets you meet a weaker player on the next round. Given that scheme, a well-known tournament strategy consists in loosing the first game on purpose in order to play against weaker opponents and have an easier tournament, and only catch up with the leader towards the end of the tournament to beat them after they have been struggling to stay on top during most of the tournament. But in practice, a very small minority of players actually follow this strategy, which tends to be considered too 'risky'.

Here, I used techniques from multivariate exploratory statistical analysis such as the principal component analysis in order to test whether the strategy that consists in loosing the first game on purpose was actually productive in a real chess tournament. In the two tournaments I examined, the outcome of all but the first game correlated with the player ranking at the end of the tournament. This result is consistent with the idea that the strategy that consists in loosing the first game on purpose may be viable in practice.

File type

PDF document

Language

French

Available versions

	Published on	Size	Changes
	16/03/2005 @ 13h07	126.83 KB	Le rapport qui analyse les données.
	16/03/2005 @ 13h05	15.71 KB	Les données associées, au format RDA, prêtes à importer dans R. Le fichier contient deux dataframes, tourn1 et tourn2, respectivement associés aux méthodes 1 et 2 décrites dans le rapport. Les données proviennent de la Fédération Française des Echecs.